Featured Directors

Featured quote (not written by me)

Cultural critic James Wolcott, on the new film critic:

"Film critics today have become these rabid completists... They feel like that with festivals, they have to see everything, no matter how minor. Part of it is bragging rights. The other part is that the only thing that feeds into their movie writing is other movies."

In the history of fantastic bad ideas, none may seem as foolhardy as the fact that Ed Hunt, the director of the schlocky Canadian horror film The Brain, originally intended for the titular character, an alien from outer space encased in gelatinous goo who wants to use TV to brainwash the human race, the ability […]

This podcast was a tough one. It’s an interview with the writer of Going the Distance, Geoff LaTulippe. Geoff wrote the original screenplay that was on the 2008 Blacklist (Up in the Air was also on it), which is a list of all of the best unproduced screenplays floating around Hollywood. I’ve read Geoff’s screenplay, […]

There are many critics who like to feign anger or moral outrage towards a movie. That’s purely an emotional reaction and not an intellectual one; the truth is that very few films are worthy of any sort of ire, it’s just a terrific way to get attention by piling on the derogatory snark. Exceptions do […]

There’s an undiagnosed illness that most people don’t know about. But it can affect their personalities completely. Away We Go, Sam Mendes’ (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) new comedy-drama about a couple (John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph) going through their first pregnancy and how they travel all across the country to try to find the best place […]

The late 1960’s were a troubled time for the major studios of Hollywood. Expensive musicals like Hello Dolly had failed as had pricey westerns like Paint Your Wagon. The success of Easy Rider was considered a breakthrough and set up the director-centric 1970’s spawning one crafty film nerd filmmaker after another, such as Francis Ford […]

Now on DVD and Blu-Ray

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]

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Featured Quote (written by me)

On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.